Get to Know Rev. Daniel P. Moloney, Ph.D.

The story below was originally published in The Athenaeum, MTSM’s bi-annual magazine. The Athenaeum is published twice a year for alumni, patrons and friends of Mount St. Mary’s Seminary & School of Theology. To be added to the mailing list, contact: Heidi Walsh at 513.233.6159 or hwalsh@athenaeum.edu.

Rev. Daniel P. Moloney, Ph.D. is the newest member of the MTSM priest faculty, serving as Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Theology and a member of the Formation Team. His vocational journey is a unique one that began in Ohio, and eventually made its way back.

A native of Columbus, after graduating from St. Charles Preparatory School, he went to Yale University to major in computer science when he encountered the newest Doctor of the Church for the first time and changed his trajectory.

“While at Yale, I began to take my spiritual life more seriously and had begun to read the magazine First Things,” Fr. Moloney said. “There was an article on John Henry Newman and
encountering Newman, one of the great apologists of the Church, was important as I began to get stronger in thinking and becoming more philosophical. I opened the course catalog and saw there was going to be a seminar on Newman. At that point I decided to become a religious studies major while taking philosophy classes.”

The timing of his switch of majors was helped by circumstances at Yale, which laid the path for the next steps on his journey.

“The philosophy department at Yale was in flux at the time, as they were trying to find a Yale-caliber chair for the department,” Fr. Moloney recalled. “Because of that, they were calling around to the best scholars and saying ‘hey, come be a visiting professor for a semester.’ I had all these great professors which gave me a top-flight education in religious philosophy and Catholic theology.”

Upon graduation from Yale, Fr. Moloney began master’s studies at the University of Notre Dame, a time which he described as “a bit of a Catholic crossroads” as he worked to discern his next step. After completing his master’s, he became an editor at First Things before returning to Notre Dame for his doctorate in philosophy. His dissertation eventually became the basis for a published book Mercy: What Every Catholic Should Know, which was released in 2020.

Following his doctorate, Fr. Moloney did a fellowship at Princeton as he continued to work through his Catholic crossroads. That took him to Rome, where he enrolled at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross to get his Bachelor’s degree in Theology (S.T.B.), an experience which helped give him clarity.

“I did not really enjoy Rome, but I came back with the idea that I wanted to be a diocesan priest,” Fr. Moloney said. “While in Rome, I saw there were a lot of smart men studying to be diocesan priests and they were happy about it. Prior to college, that was something that had never occurred to me. However, I am the third generation of my family to be in the priesthood or religious life, as my mother’s uncle and brother are as well.”

As his family had moved away from the Columbus area during his time in school, Fr. Moloney felt he had a calling but not a place to take it. A conversation with one of the United States’ most distinguished prelates helped change that.

“I had spent so much time over the 20 years at or around universities that I had a lot of opinions about college campus ministry and how it could be done better,” Fr. Moloney noted. “Boston has 65 colleges and universities, so I figured there would be opportunities there to do that. I reached out to (Seán) Cardinal O’Malley to ask if he would take me on and he readily said ‘yes’.”

Fr. Moloney was ordained to the priesthood in 2010 and after a stint in parish ministry was named the chaplain for the University of Massachusetts-Boston campus and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he could live out the vocation he envisioned.

“I felt the Church was broadly overlooking colleges,” Fr. Moloney observed. “Our parishes have great youth ministers, but there was no programming for these students in their 20s. For me, personally, college was where I grew a lot in my faith. In addition, these areas also have large graduate student, faculty and staff populations. We should be plowing more resources
into these populations as they continue to develop their faith.”

MTSM is not Fr. Moloney’s first in seminary formation. After his time in Massachusetts, he was on the priest faculty at St. John Vianney Theological Seminary in Denver before serving as a chaplain at the St. Thomas More Newman Center at The Ohio State University last year.

“One of my own realizations that I have come to is that parish priests are public intellectuals,” Fr. Moloney said. “He stands in front of hundreds of people every week and talks about what he is thinking about. I want to be able to help the men handle the ideas; they can learn how to think well, how to read well and study on their own so they can be competent in answering the difficult questions that modern life presents Catholics.”

Nearing the end of his first semester at MTSM, Fr. Moloney has been teaching a course on prayer to the first-year seminarians in the Propaedeutic stage, and is looking forward to getting into
more teaching work in addition to his formation meetings.

“The seminary was already doing good work,” Fr. Moloney concluded. “The men in formation here are mature, interesting and strive to be good in all things. I get to be able to do a lot teaching, writing and learning from colleagues here, while still being involved in the pastoral life of the seminary and the men in formation.”